Step by step to a greener lifestyle. Easy greening for families! We are a husband and wife team who want to help others get started living greener and saving money by doing simple and affordable things that make a big difference in your community and the world.

Insulating Our House Really Worked!

This fall we finally insulated our walls and increased the insulation in our attic. We had blown in cellulose put in. It rocks. Today the high was 25°F outside plus a wind chill in the single digits. Our upstairs thermostat was set to 55°F during the day and it never fell below 62°F upstairs (according to the thermostat). I found it fairly comfortable when I came up to put the baby down for his nap. Not to mention the sound buffering. It’s much quieter inside our house (when no one else is home!) than it was before.

Rows of siding removed and holes were insulation was blown in between studs. Later the original siding was replaced.

The process of installing cellulose insulation was fairly simple. They took off a few rows of siding around the whole house, 1st and 2nd floors. Then they drilled holes in the walls, blew in the cellulose, then plugged the holes and put the siding back up. They used timers each time they had the insulation blowing, if it ran too long, they’d look inside to see if there was a problem, such as an open wall to the basement. We didn’t have any, because before they started insulating, they air sealed the entire house and made sure that all the walls were closed at the bottom.

We have a 1600 square foot house and the whole thing, walls and attic, was done in a day and a half.

One thing to note is that our house is more humid now that it’s all sealed up and insulated. We put an exhaust fan in the bathroom to help minimize any humidity problems. So far the humidity has been a good thing meaning we haven’t had to set up the humidifiers so far this winter.

With one row of siding off, they are blowing insulation into the wall cavity. Afterwards they put back the original siding.

I should mention that we also had our 33 year old natural gas boiler (heating system) replaced last winter with a 96% efficient gas boiler. With the insulation and new boiler, we reduced our gas usage in November by over 55% and saved $82.

I cannot say enough good things about getting your house insulated! If the benefits to the environment don’t convince you, the benefits to your bank account should! The insulation work cost us $4,000 before any rebates or incentives (For us the rebate from our gas company was $2,000 and the federal tax incentive is $1,500). We are on target to save $800 on our heating bill this year.

Happy Greening!
Alicia

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I found this type of attic insulation a few years back that I could just roll out in my attic and not touch the fibelgrass. It had some kind of thin plastic around it. It was like two inches thick and then after you rolled it out it kept growing and growing to over a foot thick.Great stuff but as I recall it wasn’t cheap.

What a great idea! We had planned to blow insulation into our attic crawl space earlier this year, but ran out of time before winter arrived. We are still going to do it, but it’ll have to be after the holidays now.

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